Wiktor Wiarecki is an unsuccessful writer. He is also not successful in his personal life: Wiktor's marriage is in crisis, and his adult son wants nothing to do with his father. The turning point is the death of his friend Wiarecki, an outstanding writer Stefan Przewłocki. A literary widow gives Wiktor the materials for the deceased's last novel.
A group of people find themselves stuck in remote train station in German-occupied Poland. A drunk German station guard there gets paranoid and sees partisans all around him, phones headquarters, and when the German soldiers arrive and search the station they find a gun. They then threaten to execute every fifth person unless someone claims it.
A bus crashes and its passengers find themeselves in the afterlife, which they find has the not only the same set of rules as Earth, but also the same bureaucratic chaos.
An intimate psychological drama: the story of two brothers who, in the winter of 1848, waited for the opportunity to enter General Bem's troops in Hungary and experience emotional conflicts in a noble manor, which lead to a fundamental confrontation of attitudes and characters.